From the outskirts of São Paulo to the world. Born in 1975 in Jardim Martinica, a poor neighborhood in the south of São Paulo, the artist Eduardo Kobra has become one of the most recognized muralists today, with works on 5 continents

Since the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016, he holds the record for the largest graffiti mural in the world – first with ‘Etnias’, painted to celebrate the event, with 2,500 square meters; mark surpassed by himself in 2017, with a work in honor of chocolate that occupies a wall of 5,742 square meters on the margins of the Castello Branco Highway, in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo.

One of his most famous works is ‘O Beijo’, performed in 2012 on the High Line in New York – erased four years later. It is a colorful reinterpretation of the image made by the American photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995) on August 13, 1945, when the people took to the streets to commemorate the end of World War II.

Kobra started drawing on walls in hiding, as a graffiti artist, even during his adolescence. The taste for spontaneous street art was already visible in the boy, who collected warnings for unauthorized interventions at school and was even arrested three times for environmental crime – precisely because of the irregular use of sprays on nearby walls.

In the 1990s, he worked making posters, painting toy scenarios and creating decorative images for events in what was the largest amusement park in Brazil. It was the first time that he, the son of a tapestry maker and a housewife, had made money from his images. The work was successful, so much so that it earned him invitations to work in other companies and with advertising agencies.

His urban art began to gain visibility in the following decade. In 2007, he appeared prominently in the media for the first time because of the Muro das Memórias project, in which he immersed himself in the universe of old photos from São Paulo and started to reproduce them in the streets in sepia tones or in black and white, presenting a graffiti style different from the one that spread around the city.

This project ended up becoming a brand, the embryo of much of what was to come next.